'I didn't want to write this book': Michael Crummey on the troubled journey of The Innocents

When Michael Crummey finished his 2009 novel Galore, he went through a period of mourning.

The novel, which would go on to win a Commonwealth Writers Prize and be shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Award and Governor General’s Award for Fiction, told a sprawling and wonderfully strange tale about a man who emerges from the belly of a beached whale in a remote 18th-century coastal town in Newfoundland. It spanned two centuries, involved numerous eccentric characters and delved deep into superstition, family, myth and otherworldly powers. It was a colourful, complex world that was hard to leave behind.

“I went into a bit of a depression after that book was done and I couldn’t understand why because I’ve never experienced that before,” says Crummey in an interview with Postmedia from a tour stop in Toronto. “It wasn’t until I figured out that I was missing the book, I was missing working on the book everyday and revisiting that community, that I was able to shake myself and get over it.”

His response after leaving the isolated world he created for his most recent novel, The Innocents, on the other hand, was quite different. It gestated in his mind for years, but, when he finally buckled down to write, it flowed from him rather quickly. The story, about a brother and sister who are orphaned and left to their own devices in an isolated cove on Newfoundland’s northern coastline in the 18th century, is as sparsely populated as the rugged environment where it takes place. Part coming-of-age story and part harrowing survival tale, it also enters some tricky territory when the siblings begin to negotiate puberty and the deep mysteries of their sexuality.

Unlike Galore, the world of The Innocents became one Crummey wanted to exorcise, not dwell in.

“Once I made up my mind to try and write it, I worked every day for three-and-a-half months,” Crummey says. “It felt like it was all there and I wanted to get it out of me as quickly as I could. Then, it was very strange; it was almost like I hadn’t written a book and in some ways I forgot it. It was kind of like a fever dream. I kept having to remind myself what was in the book and what order it was in because I had forgotten a lot of it. It’s a very different experience than anything I’ve had before.”

It was an accidental discovery in the Newfoundland archives that set the tale into motion. Crummey found a paragraph from a clergyman who had happened upon orphans living on their own in a rugged area of 18th-century Newfoundland. The sister was pregnant and the priest figured there was only one way that could have happened in this remote area. He decided to confront and harangue the two about their inappropriate relationship and was driven away by the rifle-wielding brother. It was the only information Crummey could find about them. But he was both fascinated and a little terrified at the prospect of shaping it into a novel.

He began to think of his own upbringing in Buchans, a small mining town in the interior of Newfoundland, and the lonely, confusing journey from childhood to adolescence. It was a period that was often “gobsmackingly, appallingly awful,” he says.

“It was almost like being taken over by another being in some ways, or sharing yourself with another being that you didn’t really understand the motivations of and had to negotiate some way of living with,” he says. “And I had resources. I had supportive parents and a lot of friends and we had a sex-education class in school and skin magazines. There were things you could try and puzzle through it with. And the thought of these two children left alone, having to figure this out without any resources whatsoever, without any assistance and probably not even being able to talk to each other about it, the thought of that was just so compelling and awful. I didn’t want to write this book, I really didn’t. It felt like it was too complicated and the opportunities to screw it up were too myriad. I thought I would just leave it alone. But it stayed with me for a long, long time.”

At the beginning of The Innocents, Evered and his sister Ada are 11 and nine respectively and left alone after their parents and baby sister quickly succumb to disease. Their only connection to the outside world comes from a ship named Hope that appears on the horizon twice a year to sell supplies and sink the siblings deeper and deeper into debt. The two battle hunger, cold, uncooperative fish and their own illness. They also share the same bed, initially to ward off the cold. But things develop as the two mature, which presented a significant challenge to Crummey as a writer.

“I didn’t know how I was going to deal with it,” he says. “I didn’t have a plan. I guess I muddled my way through it in the same way that the youngsters did. It became clear to me that there was a certain kind of explicitness that was just not going to work. I sort of moved in that direction a little bit and it immediately felt wrong. The trick for me was to find away to not shy away from what was happening between them and be clear about what was happening between them but not to ever have it feel like some sort of explicit, pornographic description. I hope that I’ve found that balance but it was something that really terrified me the whole way through.”

The Innocents shares some common ground with Crummey’s previous four novels. Like River of Thieves and Galore, it’s historical fiction that vividly captures parts of Newfoundland’s rich history and culture. Like 2014’s Sweetland, which took place in modern-day rural Newfoundland, The Innocents explores isolation and the toll it can have on the psyche. But in his past work, superstitions and otherworldly elements tended to overlap in a somewhat ambiguous manner. The Innocents comes to a more clear-headed conclusion about the supernatural elements that haunt Ada, specifically her belief that the spirit of her baby sister, Martha, is looking after them.

“It seemed inevitable to me that at least one of those children would have that kind of sense,” he says. “But I did want the book to squash it as well. I didn’t want to leave open the possibility of romanticizing that somehow and thinking ‘Martha is there looking after them.’ That is not what is happening. In the end, even Ada has to admit that’s a childish thing to be thinking.”